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Friday, August 26, 2011

Lewisham Planning have put out the following notice (though it hasn't come through our doors yet):

A revised application to develop Convoys Wharf which may affect you or your property has been received by the Council as local planning authority. As you are a near neighbour, you are invited to comment on this application in writing by 27 September 2011 so that your views can be taken into account when the application is being considered. Your letter, fax or e-mail will be acknowledged, but it will not be possible for the Council to respond to your comments or any queries.

The Application has been submitted on behalf of Convoys Investment s.a.r.l. and News International Limited. A map showing the boundary of the application site is included.

You can see the planning documents on the Convoys Wharf website (Lewisham Planning's website will send you here). Or download the summary here.

Shipwright's Palace has been campaigning to have the enormous historical significance of the site fully recognised and has written a marvellous story on how things could be here in Deptford in 2020, if plans for this site were to actually acknowledge the site's heritage.

1. Deptford is the only royal dockyard with its Tudor plan extant.
The undercroft of the storehouse, the dry dock, slipways and great
basin are all structures that have their origin in the Tudor period
c.1517. Nowhere else in England testifies to the Tudor and Stuart
arrangement of a royal naval dockyard. Regardless of the condition of
the dockyard’s intrinsic structures, which are incidentally described in
archaeological reports as extremely good, the plan of these structures
has remained unchanged for five hundred years.

2. Nowhere else on the Thames in London is as rich with five
centuries of historic association with events of national and
international significance and has so little at present to visibly
demonstrate this.

3. Simply because the docks, slips and basins were filled in
intact a hundred years ago it does not mean they should remain filled
in. In particular their below ground position does not make them
archaeology, they were built ‘below ground’. Building survey is required
in order to fairly and fully assess their future potential. At
Rochefort in France, docks filled in a hundred years ago have been
successfully excavated and repaired.

4. Deptford was instrumental in securing and maintaining Britain’s
worldwide influence, leading the world in industrial design, naval
architecture and military technology. The position of Master Shipwright
at Deptford was the highest ranking of all the royal naval yards.

5. Maritime technology including the construction of docks and
basins was exported from Deptford to its immediate neighbours on the
Thames, to the outlying royal yards such as Chatham and across the
world. Expertise from Deptford was employed to create the basin at
Chatham, the port of Dover and even as far as Australia, where Capt. Sir
William Denison, who had built the basin slipways at Deptford, went on
to built Fort Denison in Sydney.

6. The success of the dockyard at Deptford gave rise to the wider
establishment of Deptford town, and it has been claimed, to the maritime
status of Greenwich.

7. The dockyard at Deptford is a significant site not only for
the United Kingdom but especially for countries such as Australia, New
Zealand and the United States. Voyages of discovery by Raleigh, Drake,
Frobisher, Vancouver and Cook as well as success in numerous naval
battles including the Armada and Trafalgar were made possible by the
technology and expertise of the infrastructure and dockyard labour at
Deptford. As well as the ‘discovery’ of the antipodean nations, the
first transports enforced and voluntary departed from Deptford.
Deptford’s expertise contributed to the raising of the Russian navy for
Peter the Great in the eighteenth century and for Catherine and Potemkin
in the nineteenth century.

8. Deptford is yet to receive the benefit of statutory heritage
policy formed in relation to naval dockyards, indeed it may be described
as socially excluded from specifically targeted maritime and naval
policy created by English Heritage in 1998, 2005, 2007 and 2011. Studies
show that areas of social deprivation benefit from investment in their
heritage environments. Heritage environments contribute significantly to
the wider development of local economies.

9. A debt is owed to Deptford by the present inheritors of the
statutory heritage agencies for multiple failures by the heritage
agencies in the past, including the loss of the Great Tudor Storehouse
of 1513 in 1954 and the demolition of the last of the c.1712 storehouse
in 1984.

10. Deptford deserves the right to fair and equal access to
statutory heritage protection applied to royal naval yards elsewhere in
order to secure the economic benefits, the social benefits and the
enjoyment of the cultural capital of its heritage environment. Research
indicating the presence of phenomena such as the persistence of urban
deprivation in particular areas of cities, suggests that poverty and
social exclusion may be related to properties of the spatial structure
of the physical form of the city.

I've downloaded the summary, 252 pages and 64mb.I read till page 100 then lost the will to live drowning under a sea of repeated buzzwords: access, open spaces, diversity, heritage,sensitive, cultural, etc etc. My own opinion is that at the moment this is a unique area, quiet and like the London I grew up in. Obviously this will change so if you've never had a poke around Watergate St or St Nicks, now is the time.

Developers will be striving to acknowledge any historical associations with the site *as little as they possibly can*, and any recognition of the impact on the lives of present residents will receive the same treatment - any '106' agreement will be token and only because the developer is obliged to.

Any opposition will have to be fought very strictly in terms of the Planning Laws, neither developers, or the Council, will pay any attention to sensible (or silly) arguments unless they contravene planning (or any other) laws.

If this application goes through, and it will do eventually, unless the credit crunch continues or if the project becomes financially unviable. you can look forward to the kind of high rise buildings that are now common over much of SE London (and further).

Walk over to Loampit Vale - if you like it, fine, and if you like the thought of property being bought up by investors from the far east, fine, but if you want something for the residents of the borough then thats not what you're going to get (Don't forget that the Section 106 swimming pool is a replacement for the pool in Ladywell and will have to cater for 1000s for people so isn't an addition, it's a replacement).